Earlier this week, an old man with a heavily starched collar and powdered hair was interviewed about the headlines of the day by a free daily commuter paper. Among other things, he said that Greeks and Italians have disgusting habits, and that Russian men are ugly. He also said that while British singer Adele "has a beautiful face and a divine voice," she's "a little too fat."

Such incendiary comments would normally be dismissed out of hand as the ravings of a 78-year-old bigot, and of importance to no one. Except that the septuagenarian in question is Karl Lagerfeld who, as the creative director of megabrand Chanel, is one of the fashion industry's most influential and powerful figures; his comments were made as a guest editor of the free Paris newspaper Metro. In the fashion and cultural blogosphere, he's now rolling in deep doodoo, but so far, there's been no corporate damage control.

At first I bristled, too - who is this anachronistic dandy and who does he think he is to comment on an individual's weight? (And on a related note: Why does Chanel let him speak publicly?) Never mind what Chanel's many Russian oligarch haute couture clients think of his remarks. Having famously slimmed down a decade ago, shedding almost 100 pounds - and with them his need for constantly flitting paper fans - perhaps Lagerfeld feels he has special licence.

But part of me is grateful Lagerfeld continues to make provocative throwaway comments. At least through him we hear the voice of the fashion industry's pervasive but otherwise tacit opinion. Designer John Galliano's hate speech aside, Lagerfeld is maybe the one designer whose private opinion isn't totally filtered through politically correct PR. In design, Lagerfeld can be pretty brilliant at modulating the fashion house's history with the zeitgeist, and in this case, his knack voices the insidiously silent opinions held in private, and has us talking about them.

To his credit, he's not being a hypocrite, like the many other designers who wax on about how much they "love women" even as they continue to whip up runway sample collections that barely fit malnourished prepubescent girls.

Those minuscule frocks have influence well beyond their sales: They're the first step and de facto source of fashion image-making. Models need to be small enough to fit into the original samples that are loaned out, months in advance of publication, to magazines to photograph and feature in their editorial shoots. These images then shape the taste and aspiration of the women who read the magazines. It's not even that the runway sample patterns can't be graded up for size (they are, usually, to a 10, sometimes a 12), it's that the clothes themselves are designed with a size-smallest woman's body in mind. There is little relation between these clothes and women's bodies.

Chanel, like its haute couture and ready-to-wear counterparts, offers runway spectacles every season. These marketing tools are often of great beauty, but disconnected from reality on even the most basic level. It's no surprise that fashion brands make more money selling perfume and accessories associated with their runway image, rather than the garments themselves. (Fun fact: Only about 25% of a fashion label's revenue comes from the clothes, making the runway shows and expensive collections a kind of loss-leader for their other products.)

A couple of years ago, fashion flirted briefly with bringing sizes larger than 2 and 4 into its mainstream, making room for so-called "real" plussize women the way it might promote dirndl skirts as the latest trend (French Elle even did a whole Spécial Rondes!).

At the time, Lagerfeld jumped aboard the bandwagon, celebrating The Gossip's Beth Ditto at a party in Paris. He photographed burlesque dancer Miss Dirty Martini for V Magazine. But even then, he didn't bother to put clothes on her: She may have been given pride of place walking down Chanel's famous mirrored rue Cambon staircase in the pictorial, but she posed wearing only black pantyhose, her topless flesh decorated with the house motif camellia brooches as pasties. The following season, the fad - dare I say fetish? - was replaced with minimalism, and the magazines and runways were again blanketed with sylphs.

It's no surprise that given his occupation, Lagerfeld sees women primarily as potential mannequins for his narrow tastes. Before he launched his namesake collaboration with Macy's last fall, Lagerfeld was H&M's inaugural high-low fashion collaboration. Even in 2004, the outspoken designer famously objected to the mass-market chain selling his designs in larger sizes, stating that they were intended "for slender and slim people."

If Lagerfeld finds Adele a little too fat for his fashion, there's an obvious simple solution: Maybe he should just design something in her size.

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